Archive for August, 2009

Remember the avalanche of political obituaries journalists wrote following Sarah Palin’s decision to step down as governor?

Sarah Palin was 14 for 14 defeating one trumped-up “ethics” violation after another from unhinged leftists who were using the courts as a means to attack her. But in today’s caricature of justice that liberalism has created, one can win big and lose huge: she was at least $500,000 in debt – and I’ve heard figures close to $1 million – fending off these frivolous lawsuits. With her own children under vile personal attack, with her family deep in debt through no fault of her own, and with her very ability to govern hamstrung by “Sarah Palin Derangement Syndrome,” she stepped down and left the governance of Alaska to her trusted lieutenant.

And it was revealing how the very same people who unrelentingly dumped on Sarah Palin as some kind of inbred hill-billy chick who wasn’t qualified to manage a 7-11 were outraged by her decision to step down as governor.

In any event, if I had a nickel for every mainstream media entry into the “Sarah Palin is finished” narrative, I’d be so filthy rich it would be unreal.

Not bad for a political has-been who destroyed her platform and popularity by stepping down.

Now we learn another little factoid about Sarah Palin’s ongoing relevance:

Palin worth $100,000 per hour; over 1,000 invitations so far

August 31, 9:57 AM Fresno Political Buzz Examiner Nicco Capozzi

Many pundits, Alaskans, and simple political observers have pondered why Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin resigned from office. One answer now seems apparent—money. Since her resignation, Palin has been offered over 1,000 invitations to make paid speeches, appear, and campaign on behalf of politicians and political groups.

She has received offers from numerous speakers’ bureaus (scouts for speechmakers) and has reportedly signed with at least one of them, the Washington Speakers Bureau. Washington Speakers Bureau’s clientele currently consist of Former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, Bob Woodward, Katie Couric, Colin Powell, Rudy Giulianni, Alan Greenspan, and many others. For a full list of speakers click here.

Nearly all of the over 1,000 invitations include request for speeches. On top of the speeches, over 120 political candidates from all levels of federal and state government have requested Palin to appear on their behalf at various political events. She will also make cameos for charities, Christian organizations, and other related social causes and groups.

So when Palin beckoned to Alaskans that she would better serve them not as their governor but as a private citizen, what she really meant was, she will raise a tremendous amount of money so that she could have a better chance of running for President in 2012. Or, she could have resigned simply to make money without having any plans to run for higher office. Of the 1,000 speech invitations, almost all will be bring the former governor $100,000 each.

Palin has not yet confirmed where she will be speaking or campaigning, but responses to the invitations are expected to begin this week. However, one cannot expect Palin to hurry in confirming such invitations as she has her book to finish (reported to be 85% complete), and a giant file of other offers ranging from cable to business ventures that she is still considering. With all the possibilities, it is no wonder Palin left a $100,000 government job as she can now make that in one hour of work—a sum to which soccer moms and plumbers can certainly relate.

Now, of course, that last sentence immediately above is just pure bitter leftist showing through. Sarah Palin could be the most successful human being who ever lived, and the leftwing wouldn’t allow her so much as one yoctogram of praise or credibility. Comprehending reality is just not in their nature.

Not only has Sarah Palin not lost her relevance; but she has gained more than she had when she was serving as governor of Alaska.

You know who really SHOULD step down? Every single “journalist” who discredited himself or herself trying to tear Sarah Palin down. How much credibility do the people who wrote Sarah Palin’s obituary deserve?

University of Maryland senior research scientist John Lott Jr. says news coverage of the economy is slanted. Lott writes, “Over 78 percent more negative news stories discussed a recession when the economy — under a Republican president was soaring than occurred under a Democrat when the economy was shrinking.”

Lott — who researched 12,500 newspaper and wire service articles from 1985 through 2004 — also found that Democratic presidents got positive headlines 15 percent more of the time than Republican presidents for the same economic news.

Of his findings Lott writes, “The media’s focus on the negative side of everything surely helps explain people’s pessimism… Indeed, research has indicated that media bias is real.”

The media helped Obama fearmonger the economy when he wanted them to fearmonger the economy to push through his stimulus; but now they’re are trying to talk up the economy when Obama wants them to talk up the economy. They are dutifully reporting that the recession seems to be over.

Failed banks tend to be smaller and private, which exacerbates the problem for small business borrowers, said Kanas, who became CEO of BankUnited when his firm bought the bank and is the former chairman and CEO of North Fork bank.

“Government money has propped up the very large institutions as a result of the stimulus package,” he said. “There’s really very little lifeline available for the small institutions that are suffering.”

This comes at a time when the FDIC has established new rules on bank sales. Private equity, for instance, would have to hold double the capital of their competitors in order to buy such an institution, said Kanas.

“This will have somewhat of a chilling effect on our participation,” he said. “As a result of having to keep higher capital levels, we’ll see lower prices coming from that sector.”

Of the 81 failed banks this year, two have been successfully acquired by private equity, he said. Kanas’ private equity firm bought UnitedBank, the failed Florida-based bank, from the FDIC in May. Regulators also allowed the sale of IndyMac Bank of California earlier this year.

“We are seeing more people step up and lobby bids in this situation,” he said. “We’re seeing more players mostly as a result of being attracted to the sector. I’m not so sure that will continue now that the rules have been ratchet it up.”

Meanwhile, much of the commercial realty problem resides in the regional and small community banks, said Kanas, because larger banks haven’t fueled that sector in the past.

“The market is expecting about the way we were expecting,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re not seeing any evidence of a recovery in the real estate market in the southern Florida market,” he said.

It’s rather interesting that there’s a strong argument that Obama’s regulations are actually hurting our recovery, but Obama doesn’t have to worry about that message getting out to the public. His secret, clearly, is completely safe with the mainstream media.

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the fund it uses to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.

And think about it: one thousand banks failing over the next two years is to the notion of “economic recovery” what a giant asteroid hurtling toward us from space is to the statement “things are looking up for us.” But again, the mainstream media is so focused on talking up the economy that they don’t have much time for such distractions.

Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC.

While Whitney raised her short-term outlook for banks, causing stocks to open in positive territory after pointing lower earlier, she said the long-term outlook for the economy remains murky.

Consumers will not be able to spend as they continue to lose jobs and credit conditions stay tight, she said in a live interview. The result will provide a vivid display of how critical housing and lending are to economic growth. Unemployment is currently at 9.5 percent but is expected to keep rising.

“We underestimate how much the whole economy is dependent on the mortgage industry, and that has to change,” Whitney said. “This is what happens when you delay the inevitable. We’re buying time here, but we’re not restructuring the economy.”

The dire assessment comes amid a slight stabilization in the U.S. housing market after three years of price drops, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The report states that the drop in home prices is fueling a vicious cycle of foreclosures as it eliminates homeowner equity and gives borrowers an incentive to walk away from their mortgage.

But, the foreclosed homes are not coming onto the market because people are finding out they can stay living in them and not pay their mortgage, according to Kudrle.

“The Obama administration is putting so much pressure on the banks and lenders to slow down the foreclosure process to try and keep people in their homes,” Kudrle said. “We have people who have not made a payment for 12 to 18 months and the bank still hasn’t come in to foreclose.”

That’s not a policy that is going to correct our financial woes; it’s just a delaying tactic that will ultimately make a bad problem far, far worse by postponing and in fact stockpiling the coming misery.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.” . . .

Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Jim Johnson, Daniel Mudd. That’s just part of your list of Democrats who ran Fannie Mae into the ground and profited wildly in doing so. The Wall Street Journal cites the first three names for disgrace in the Fannie Mae Enron-scheme they produced. The fourth figure, Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd, showed just how far to the left Fannie Mae was politically when he said to THE most radically liberal wing of the Democrat Party – the Congressional Black Caucus – the following:

So many of you have been good friends to Fannie Mae and our mission. You’ve been friends through thick and thin. We have indeed come upon a difficult time for Fannie Mae… In many ways I want to tell you today you are also the conscience of Fannie Mae.

President Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to create tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Bush’s efforts led to two major Republican efforts to push through regulations that would have limited the mess that Fannie and Freddie could create, but their every move was fiercely resisted by Democrats. The first time, Barney Frank – leading the Democratic effort to shield Fannie and Freddie from necessary regulatory reform in 2003, said:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Again, in 2005, Republicans tried and failed to establish necessary regulatory reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at a time when reforms could have averted the 2008 disaster. Again Democrats unanimously rose up to block any such effort. John McCain warned:

If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

But Democrats refused to heed the warnings. And when the economy DID collapse BECAUSE of their refusal to deal with the GSEs that they had politically-benefited from, the very people who created the disaster in the first place poised themselves to benefit from it by demagoguing Republicans whose greatest sin was not being strong enough in their efforts to stand up and stop Democrats from advancing a ruinous agenda.

Think about it: seventeen calls for regulatory reform of the housing mortgage industry, all resisted by Democrats. Two major efforts at regulatory reform, both blocked by fierce and united Democrat opposition. And then Democrats demonized Republicans for refusing to enact regulations. That’s called ‘chutzpah.’ And when the mainline media reported it as if it were somehow true, it was called ‘propaganda.’

His supporters followed through…
But, don’t expect the state-run media to report on this.

The Tucson area Tea Party Coalition held a meeting at Rincon High School in Tucson this weekend. Over 1,000 people showed up at the event… including one violent counter-protester.

The pro-Obama thug disrupted the meeting screaming– marched to the front of the room holding a sign——
And, then SLAMMED AN ATTENDEE IN THE FACE with his elbow!

Here’s the video:

Hat Tip Rod

***Here is the video of the pro-Obama thug disrupting the meeting before he smashed the attendee with his elbow. And KGUN has a clear shot of the assault.
The protester identified himself as Don Alvarez.

Don Alvarez, who committed a violent act of assault against a man who was clearly only trying to talk with him (the man who was assaulted held back his companion who was rushing the protester following the assault) actually had the balls to claim that HE had been assaulted.

Thank God for video-camera-equipped cell phones.

I very much hope that the man is arrested and charged for his act of criminal assault.

And that this frankly fascist leftwing demagoguery attacking people for exercising their rights to peaceably assemble will finally come to an end as it’s revealed for the farce it is and always has been.

The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?

Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?
Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?

But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making.

Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption of GDP. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been easy to ride out the recession. In that case we would still have had to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit that would have approached $1 trillion.

Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally irresponsible? Yes, of course.

But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.

Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.

“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.

Or, in the president’s own language, the government must equalize the circumstances of the “waitress” with those of the “lucky.” It is thus a fitting and proper role of the new federal government to rectify imbalances of compensation — at least for those outside the anointed Guardian class. In a 2001 interview Obama in fact outlined the desirable political circumstances that would lead government to enforce equality of results when he elaborated on what he called an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Still, why would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?

Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.

Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.

The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care. Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.

Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.

We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.

Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.

Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.

None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.

Usually such ideologies do not take hold in America, given its tradition of liberty, frontier self-reliance, and emphasis on personal freedom rather than mandated fraternity and egalitarianism. At times, however, the stars line up, when a national catastrophe, like war or depression, coincides with the appearance of an unusually gifted, highly polished, and eloquent populist. But the anointed one must be savvy enough to run first as a centrist in order later to govern as a statist.

Given the September 2008 financial meltdown, the unhappiness over the war, the ongoing recession, and Barack Obama’s postracial claims and singular hope-and-change rhetoric, we found ourselves in just such a situation. For one of the rare times in American history, statism could take hold, and the country could be pushed far to the left.

That goal is the touchstone that explains the seemingly inexplicable — and explains also why, when Obama is losing independents, conservative Democrats, and moderate Republicans, his anxious base nevertheless keeps pushing him to become even more partisan, more left-wing, angrier, and more in a hurry to rush things through. They understand the unpopularity of the agenda and the brief shelf life of the president’s charm. One term may be enough to establish lasting institutional change.

Obama and his supporters at times are quite candid about such a radical spread-the-wealth agenda, voiced best by Rahm Emanuel — “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid” — or more casually by Obama himself — “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

So we move at breakneck speed in order not to miss this rare opportunity when the radical leadership of the Congress and the White House for a brief moment clinch the reins of power. By the time a shell-shocked public wakes up and realizes that the prescribed chemotherapy is far worse than the existing illness, it should be too late to revive the old-style American patient.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.

The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.

The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Nobody wants to believe that a large and influential group of our leaders would want to create a catastrophe as a means of having an opportunity to impose their will upon an ensuing “super-government” that would necessarily have to arise from the ashes. The concept strikes many as madness.

Only it’s happened too many times in just this century to label as “madness.” It is, in fact, the goal of virtually every revolutionary movement. You have to tear down the old in order to create the new.

Consider the fact that the leftist organizers of the 1960s – like Barack Obama’s friend and mentor William Ayers, who was instrumental in Obama’s early career and his run in politics – are very much still around and still profoundly shaping the leftist agenda. Take Ayers’ Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Jones, whose Apollo Alliance wrote a big chunk of Obama’s stimulus package. Take Tom Hayden (who endorsed Obama), leader of the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society. He proclaimed in a landmark 1962 speech that the youth must wrest control of society from their elders, and that to that end universities had to be transformed into incubators of revolutionary “social action.” And his calls to use any means necessary to achieve that “social action” – certainly including violence and force – colored and in fact defined the entire 60s leftist radicalism. Hayden was one of the writers of the “Berkeley Liberation Program.” Some highlights: “destroy the university, unless it serves the people”; “all oppressed people in jail are political prisoners and must be set free”; “create a soulful socialism”; “students must destroy the senile dictatorship of adult teachers.” And his “community outreach” fomented horrific race riots.

These people are still dictating the agenda of the left today. They were trying to fundamentally transform society then, and they are trying to fundamentally transform society today. Only their tactics have changed; the goal remains the same.

You don’t think Barack Obama – who was in turn mentored by communist Frank Marshall Davis, by radical organizer Saul Alinsky, by terrorist William Ayers – (the link is to a CNN story demonstrating that Obama’s relationship to Ayers was MUCH deeper than Obama claimed) – doesn’t value these people and share their values? Then, to put it very bluntly, you are a fool. The words of our current president:

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.”

But of course, Obama really wasn’t alienated, by his own statement. He was a member of a community–a community of far-far-leftist radicals.

Well, let me tell you what the Cloward-Piven proponents believe will happen: they think the coming complete crash of our economic system will result in the complete takeover of the economy and the society by the state. They think that as panicked and hungry people look around at the disaster big government created, they will have no choice but to turn to government for help. They think that they will finally have the socialist utopia they always dreamed of but American independence and self-reliance would never allow.

If by some miracle in defiance of all the laws of economics Obama’s economic policy actually doesn’t kill our economy, Obama and Democrats will win big. If, far more likely, Obama’s economic policy causes a crash of the entire system, liberals believe that Democrats will ultimately STILL win big.

You can call me crazy if you like. But mark my words.

As you see things getting worse, and liberals using the complete and catastrophic failure of big government to justify even MORE and even BIGGER big government, what might seem crazy to you now will make a lot more sense.

A volunteer cleans up glass at the Colorado Democratic Party Headquarters after someone smashed nearly all the windows of the office early Tuesday morning, on August 25, 2009. (THE DENVER POST

A 24-year-old arrested this morning on suspicion of smashing 11 windows at Colorado Democratic Party headquarters tried to conceal his identity while allegedly committing the crime, according to police descriptions.

Maurice Schwenkler wore a shirt over his face, a hooded sweat shirt and latex gloves before he and another man fled the scene on bicycles, police said. Schwenkler was apprehended after a short chase. The other suspect remains at large.

While Schwenkler does not appear in the state’s voter registration database, a person by that name in November 2008 received $500 from a political 527 committee called Colorado Citizens Coalition for “communications,” according to campaign finance disclosures.

The accountant for the 527 appears to be the same woman who handles the books for many other Democratic-leaning political committees.

A Maurice Schwenkler also signed an online 2005 petition to free anti-war Christian protesters who were captured in Iraq.

State Democratic Party Chairwoman Pat Waak initially blamed the vandalism on animosity surrounding the health care debate, though Denver police declined to comment on possible motives.

The shattered windows were emblazoned with posters touting President Barack Obama and the Democratic position on health care reform.

The other storefronts surrounding the building on West Eighth Avenue and Santa Fe Drive in downtown Denver’s art district were untouched. But the Democratic posters are scuffed from hammer blows, Waak said.

“We ought to be having a serious, conscientious debate about what’s best for the country,” Waak said. “Clearly there’s been an effort on the other side to stir up hate. I think this is the consequence of it.”

She estimates the damage at $11,000.

An officer on patrol spotted vandals in the act around 2:20 a.m. and took Schwenkler into custody after a short chase, Denver police spokeswoman Vicki Ferrari said.

Ariel Attack, a Denver-based anarchist, was arrested at 2:27am Tues, 24 here in Denver for allegedly smashing 11 windows of the Democratic Party headquaters at 777 Santa Fe Drive.

***PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY***

Ariel Attack, a Denver-based anarchist, was arrested at 2:27am Tues, 24 here in Denver for allegedly smashing 11 windows of the Democratic Party headquaters at 777 Santa Fe Drive.

Right now we are trying to raise the bail money for her to get out of jail; her bail hearing will be tomorrow at 10am Denver time. Several lawyers have told us to expect anywhere from between $3,000 to $10,000 in bail, and due to the high publicity of the case here in Denver, we are expecting higher (lead story for most all local news outlets, and being picked up by national news networks).

At this moment, we do not know Ariel’s status within the jail, especially regarding her gender classification. We have been unable to talk with Ariel since she went in. She is listed in the jail records and media under her birth name. We also do not know what plans, if any, she had made for this situation.

So you see, when you hear about the “stirring up of hate,” think Democrats.

When you see a swastika and hear a Democrat talking about the vileness of Republicans, realize that a Democrat almost certainly put it there.

When you see Democrats blaming Republicans for something that is truly awful, realize that in all probability, a Democrat did it.

This has been going on at least since the 1960s, when radical black students burned a cross in a black women’s dorm to justify their violent riots.

When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and now the president’s own deputy press secretary conjure up images of Nazis at healthcare town halls, they are engaging in one of the oldest tricks in anyone’s book, but an especial favorite of their mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky himself employed this method, quite deviously. Alinsky biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using precisely this same diabolical tactic to deceive the people. From Horwitt’s Let Them Call Me Rebel:

“…in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University…students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations – a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration’s Vietnam War policies. The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative – and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.’ And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results.”

Planting major falsehoods has been a favorite Alinsky strategy from the start. His acolyte, Barack Obama, learned his Industrial Areas Foundation lessons on deceiving for power while on a side trip during his Harvard years, then taught the Alinsky power tactics at the University of Chicago.

Democrats are increasingly becoming truly vile people. They don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in objective truth, they believe in the same postmodern and existentialist principles that led to Marxism and Nazism, and their philosophy of “will to power” permits them to say anything or do anything that will advance their agenda – no holds barred, and no consequences beyond their ideological objective ever once considered.

Virginia Slims used to run an ad campaign called, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The ads for the women’s-marketed cigarette brand ran on the theme that it was hip and modern for women to smoke. But the hidden subtext of the campaign was, “Look how far you’ve come: now you can die a nasty preternatural death of cancer just like the men.”

In a lot of ways, Barack Obama is the new “You’ve come a long way, baby” poster boy. He was marketed as the historic first black president in American history – but now that we’ve come this far, we’re going to see our nation perish to a cancer of “Marxist-red” ink.

A couple of truly terrifying articles who just what an unmitigated – and historic – disaster Barack Obama’s presidency has been in just six short months:

How much is President Obama boosting federal spending? The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl puts a little perspective on the numbers made public today:

· This year, Washington will spend $30,958 per household, tax $17,576 per household, and borrow $13,392 per household. This spending is not just temporary: President Obama would permanently keep annual spending between $5,000 and $8,000 per household higher than it had been under President Bush.
· The 22 percent spending increase projected for 2009 represents the largest government expansion since the 1952 height of the Korean War (adjusted for inflation). Federal spending is up 57 percent since 2001.

· The 2009 budget deficit will be larger than all budget deficits from 2002 through 2007 combined. More than 43 cents of every dollar Washington spends in 2009 will have been borrowed.

· One would expect the post-recession deficit to revert back to the $150 billion to $350 billion budget deficits that were typical before the recession. Instead, by 2019, the President forecasts a $917 billion budget deficit, a public debt of 77 percent of GDP, and annual net interest spending of $774 billion.

· The White House projects $10.6 trillion in new deficits between 2009 and 2019—nearly $80,000 per household in new borrowing.

· None of these estimates include the cost of health reform.

· The White House underestimates future budget deficits by trillions of dollars by(1) assuming that discretionary spending will be frozen to inflation for the next decade, (2) assuming that cap-and-trade revenues will be available to finance a Make Work Pay credit (the House-passed bill allocates those revenues elsewhere), (3) assuming health care reform will be deficit-neutral, and (4) assuming certain tax increases that are unlikely to be enacted.

Exceeding eight years of Bush deficits in just six months? You’ve come a long, way, baby.

WASHINGTON – In a chilling forecast, the White House is predicting a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion — more than the sum of all previous deficits since America’s founding. And it says by the next decade’s end the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire U.S. economy.

But before President Barack Obama can do much about it, he’ll have to weather recession aftershocks including unemployment that his advisers said Tuesday is still heading for 10 percent.

Overall, White House and congressional budget analysts said in a brace of new estimates that the economy will shrink by 2.5 to 2.8 percent this year even as it begins to climb out of the recession. Those estimates reflect this year’s deeper-than-expected economic plunge.

The grim deficit news presents Obama with both immediate and longer-term challenges. The still fragile economy cannot afford deficit-fighting cures such as spending cuts or tax increases. But nervous holders of U.S. debt, particularly foreign bondholders, could demand interest rate increases that would quickly be felt in the pocketbooks of American consumers.

Amid the gloomy numbers on Tuesday, Obama signaled his satisfaction with improvements in the economy by announcing he would nominate Republican Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The announcement, welcomed on Wall Street, diverted attention from the budget news and helped neutralize any disturbance in the financial markets from the high deficit projections.

The White House Office of Management and Budget indicated that the president will have to struggle to meet his vow of cutting the deficit in half in 2013 — a promise that earlier budget projections suggested he could accomplish with ease.

“This recession was simply worse than the information that we and other forecasters had back in last fall and early this winter,” said Obama economic adviserChristina Romer.

Let’s go back to a couple of Wall Street Journal articles to see the patent falsehood to the claim that Obama didn’t know how bad things really were:

1) “Obama Budget Relies on Rosy Economic Forecasts” – February 26, 2009. Liberals have tried to assure everyone, “Nobody could have known…” But to quote Obama’s campaign rhetoric, “Yes, we can.” At least if you write for the Wall Street Journal or a similar publication that doesn’t get it’s talking points from the Obama White House. People with half a brain (which understandably excludes the overwhelming majority of liberals) knew that Obama was pumping manure and offering one false promise based on one false assumption after another.

The truth is that there were plenty of dire forecasts and claims that Obama’s numbers didn’t jive with reality; the fact that the White House didn’t listen isn’t anyone’s fault but Obama’s.

Obama and his apologists are trying to argue that they didn’t know that the economy was so bad, but that is the most transparent and pathetic excuse given the fact that they repeatedly compared the state of the economy to the Great Depression. Here’s the question, when they did that, were they simply demonizing, demagoguing, and fearmongering – thinking all the while that they were actually lying – or were they telling the truth as they understood it (i.e. that things were catastrophically bad)? If the latter, their excuse that they didn’t know things were actually so bad simply vaporizes – because how could our present economy be worse than the Great Depression which they were comparing it too? If the former, then Obama is literally a demon who cynically hurt tens of millions of Americans by driving down the economy merely to sell his self-serving political agenda.

That Obama and his Democrat allies are liars is already a given, it’s simply a question of when they lied. And we can only hope that he is incompetent in his governance, rather than despicable in his deceitful and cynical manipulation.

Yeah, you’ve come a long way, Barry Hussein. You’ve come all the way from the “historic presidency of the first African-American in the White House,” to the most historic failure that the White House has ever seen. And your policies are proving to be such a historic failure after only six months that this nation may literally not survive the remaining 3 1/2 years of your term until we can vote you out of office and be finally rid of you.

It is a terrible and tragic shame that the mainline media propagandists fixated so much on the color of Barack Obama’s skin that they failed to look at the color of his failed ideology or his complete lack of necessary experience to lead this country.

Cheney Statement on CIA Documents/Investigation

Former Vice President Dick Cheney gave The Weekly Standard a statement Monday night about the CIA documents and the coming Justice Department investigation.

The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002. The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions. President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

The sad part in the news tonight that the interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda DID, in fact, result in the disruption of our enemies attacks against the United States and the capture of many members of AQ is the fact that these techniques will no longer be used. Meaning…..it’s a waiting game until the next successful attack:

A redacted version of the CIA Inspector General Report on the CIA interrogation program was released today. Media coverage seems to imply that CIA interrogators were constantly going beyond programmatic guidance, where the IG Report found the reality to be that “there were few instances of deviations from approved procedures.” IG Report page 5, para 10. Additionally, the media today has latched on to the use of a gun in an interrogation, without usually reporting the other important element of that salacious story, which is that the interrogator was promptly disciplined for his actions. Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith, CIA Officer Disciplined for Alleged Gun Use in Interrogation, Wash Post (Aug. 23, 2009).

Similarly going unreported today is that the release of the IG report should finally put to rest claims that the CIA interrogation program was not effective and did not produce actionable intelligence, made, for example, by Senator Whitehouse on the floor of the Senate on June 9, 2009. Analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program in the IG Report reveals the following:

• “Agency senior managers believe that lives have been saved as a result of the capture and interrogation of terrorists who were planning attacks, in particular, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Hambali, and Al-Nashiri.” page 88 para 217.
• After the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques on the bomber of the USS Cole, “al-Nashiri provided lead information on other terrorists during his first day of interrogation.” pages 35-36, para 76.
• Hambali “provided information that led to the arrest of previously unknown members of an Al-Qa’ida cell in Karachi.” page 87 para 216.
• Intelligence derived from the CIA interrogation program led to a general increase in relevant intelligence reports, producing over 3,000 intelligence reports between 9/11 and the end of April 2003. page 86 para 213.
• A redacted entity “judge the reporting from detainees as one of the most important sources for finished intelligence.” Similarly, another redacted entity “viewed analysts’ knowledge of the terrorist target as having much more depth as a result of information from detainees and estimated that detainee reporting is used in all counterterrorism articles produced for the most senior policymakers.” page 88 para 218.

Analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program in documents released with the CIA IG report reveals the following:

• “Results from the first al Qaeda HVT interrogated using the aforementioned enhanced techniques, Abu Zubayda, have been outstanding. . . . This has ultimately led to some instances of the US Government being able to neutralize Al Qaeda capabilities worldwide before there was an opportunity for those capabilities to engage in operations harmful to the United States.” CIA Business Plan discussing RDI program, page 13, March 7, 2003.
• “using the quality of the intelligence as the yardstick, the program has been an absolute success.” Interview with a senior CIA officer regarding CIA RDI program, page 1, para 2, July 17, 2003.
• “there was no other way CTC [CIA Counterterrorist Center] could have gotten the information they have obtained from the detainees.” Interview with a senior CIA officer regarding CIA RDI program, page 1, para 2, July 17, 2003.
• “detainees have provided information that led to the arrest of other terrorists Zubadayh provided information that led to the raid that netted Ramzi Bin al-Shibh.” Interview with a senior CIA officer regarding CIA RDI program, page 2, para 3, July 17, 2003.
• al Nashiri “is providing actionable intelligence” after the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques. Spot report regarding interrogation of al Nashiri, page 1, para 2, Jan. 22, 2003.

It is unclear why two other documents analyzing the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program, namely the CIA CTC Effectiveness Memo and the CIA DI Khalid Sheikh Mohammad Preeminent Source Memo, were not released contemporaneously with the IG report. DOJ legal opinions, for example, have cited the Effectiveness Memo for the proposition that “the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al-Qa’ida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.” OLC CAT Memo, page 8, May 30, 2005.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday.

The higher deficit figure, based on updated economic data, brings the White House budget office into line with outside estimates and gives further fuel to President Barack Obama’s opponents, who say his spending plans are too expensive in light of budget shortfalls.

The White House took heat for sticking with its $7.108 trillion forecast earlier this year after the Congressional Budget Office forecast that deficits between 2010 and 2019 would total $9.1 trillion.

“The new forecasts are based on new data that reflect how severe the economic downturn was in the late fall of last year and the winter of this year,” said the administration official, who is familiar with the budget mid-session review that is slated to be released next week.

Well, at least they didn’t say, “Because of George Bush…” or “Due to the evilness of the Republicans’…” So maybe they’re growing in maturity to match their skyrocketing deficits over at the White House.

Barack Obama underestimated his own spending deficit by $2 trillion; nearly 29% off in just six months. That aint exactly good budgeting. Rather, it is unprecedented BAD budgeting. Obama had all kinds of bogus assumptions, fuzzy math, and rosy scenarios. And the new $9-plus trillion figure doesn’t take into account all the other stuff that Obama is intending to do, such as spend well over a trillion more on his government health care takeover.

Let me put it this way: I have believed that Barack Obama would be the downfall of this country from the day I heard his reverend for 23 years shout, “No, no, no! Not God bless America — God damn America!!!” while Barack Obama’s fellow congregants leaped to their feet and cheered wildly. I thought he would be a complete and unmitigated disaster – and I never dreamed he would do this much damage this quickly.

Speaking of terrible budget nightmares, Obama’s somehow transforming his “half” of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Plan into $23.7 Trillion isn’t exactly great budgeting either. Did somebody say we were supposed to stop spending after we got to $350 billion? Oops.

So when Democrats and liberals talk about the projected costs of health care, just realize that neither they, or the CBO – which at least usually TRIES to be accurate in its projections – have any credibility whatsoever.

This is about as transparent as it gets. Obama’s health care plan is self-destructing, his own liberal base is falling away, and all of a sudden the Obama White House and a following-like-a-puppy mainline media is redirecting our attention to why we should supposedly be angry at the CIA so we won’t think about why we should be angry at Obama’s attempt to take over our health care. As reported:

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, is poised to order a special criminal investigation into CIA agents who may have gone too far in the interrogation of al-Qaida and other suspects taken after the 9/11 attacks, it emerged today.

The attorney general’s imminent decision to order the investigation runs counter to the wishes of the CIA director, Leon Panetta, who was appointed by Barack Obama, and has argued in favour of looking forward rather than back.

Leon Panetta apparently didn’t react well to the Democrats’ ideological and politically timed demonization of his agency:

A “profanity-laced screaming match” at the White House involving CIA Director Leon Panetta, and the expected release today of another damning internal investigation, has administration officials worrying about the direction of its newly-appoint intelligence team, current and former senior intelligence officials tell ABC News.com.

Amid reports that Panetta had threatened to quit just seven months after taking over at the spy agency, other insiders tell ABCNews.com that senior White House staff members are already discussing a possible shake-up of top national security officials.

“You can expect a larger than normal turnover in the next year,” a senior adviser to Obama on intelligence matters told ABCNews.com.

Rather than ask tough questions of terrorists, like Obama now wants to criminalize, it is apparently far better to just let them go, like Scotland did with the Lockerbie Pan Am Flight 103 bomber. He murdered 270 people, including 189 Americans. Eleven days per murdered victim seems perfectly appropriate.

Don’t you dare be tough on these poor, poor terrorists. Come on, demonstrate your liberalism by showing that famous brand of misplaced egalitarian compassion for the terrorist.

WASHINGTON — The White House says it will directly supervise a new unit that is being set up to interrogate high value terror detainees. The announcement came Monday as the Obama administration named a federal prosecutor who will investigate past cases of detainee mistreatment.

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency stood at the forefront of U.S. efforts to extract information from terror suspects in the post-9/11 era. That role is changing, according to White House spokesman Bill Burton.

But oh, happy, happy day for jihadist murderers the world over who may chance to hear from Samantha Power’s own lovely lips: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?”

Obama might as well just abolish the CIA and be done with it. He’s gutted their effectiveness as an organization by now.

[Michael] Steele also suggested that the timing was suspicious. “Now this becomes a part of the national focus and debate while we try to deal with their failure to address sufficiently, and I think smartly, the health care issue that the nation is currently confronted with,” he said, adding that “every time they find themselves up against the wall…they find a boogey man.”

“They want to make George Bush and his administration a continual boogey man and at this point I say. ‘Get over it, move on.’ ”

But what Michael Steele doesn’t realize is that Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are one-trick ponies. All they’ve GOT is demagoguery; and if that fails, they’re left with pumping sunshine. They have to keep demagoguing and demonizing every single scapegoat they can find, because otherwise the American people will see how incompetent Democrats actually are.

Obama is desperate, and he’s flailing around for anything that might change the downward-spiralling dynamic. He’s hoping that he can convince his base that he isn’t the sellout they increasingly sense he is so that they’ll put their weight behind him, and he’s closing his eyes and rolling the dice.

Let’s just hope that the dice don’t turn up the snake eyes of a major terrorist attack.

Allow me to refresh your memories concerning the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, which was the brainchild of two leftist professors to take total control of America by overwhelming its social support structures to create a “crisis”:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

I genuinely believe that Barack Obama – a follower of Saul Alinsky as well as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate when he belonged to it to go along with a long and deep relationship with leftist radicals – is pursuing a “heads we win, tails you lose” strategy. If the economy somehow miraculously picks up under all of this massive spending and even more massive debt, then Democrats win big and Republicans lose. If – far more likely – the economy crashes under its own massive weight due to hyperinflation as interest payments on the debt soar and the Obama Treasury devalues the currency by printing money, then a starving, terrified people will scream for help from their government. And Democrats will – in solving the “crisis” they themselves created – secure the pure-socialist totalitarian state they have always envisioned. Either way, Obama liberals believe they will win big.

Government by crisis is a tried and true fascist approach. It is up to you to decide whether it is a coincidence or not that Barack Obama is using the same approach, as described by his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel:

EMANUEL: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

There was just one problem: Cloward-Piven depended for its success upon a death by incrementalism, as vividly depicted by a frog placed in a pot of water. If you put the frog in boiling water, it will leap out immediately. But if you put the frog in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, you can literally cook the frog to death. Obama’s problem is that he turned the heat up too fast for the American people, and they are now leaping out of the boiling cauldron he created for them.

Or, perhaps another illustration will do to depict the American people-as-frog:

Note that the article that follows is written from a clear liberal slant (e.g., “Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.”). Nevertheless, the article clearly admits to the crisis-style mentality that Obama used to try to push through his entire agenda at once.

Barack Obama’s Big Bang is beginning to backfire, as his plans for rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care are running into stiff resistance, both in Washington and around the country.

The Obama theory was simple, though always freighted with risk: Use a season of economic anxiety to enact sweeping changes the public likely wouldn’t stomach in ordinary times. But the abrupt swing in the public’s mood, from optimism about Obama’s possibility to concern he may be overreaching, has thrown the White House off its strategy and forced the president to curtail his ambitions.

Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. These Democrats say the White House, in retrospect, made a grievous mistake by muscling conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for a cap-and-trade energy bill that was very unpopular among their constituents.

Many of those members were pounded back home because Democrats passed a bill Republicans successfully portrayed as a big tax increase on consumers. The result: many conservative Democrats were gun-shy about taking any more risky votes — or going out on a limb on health care.

The other result: The prospects for winning final passage of a cap-and-trade bill this year are greatly diminished. And, while most Democrats still predict a health care bill will pass this year, it is likely to be a shadow of what Obama once had planned.

“The majority-makers are the freshman and sophomores from conservative districts where there’s this narrative building about giveaways, bailouts and too much change at once,” said a top House Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to discuss internal politics candidly. “There’s this big snowball building in those districts. That’s why those folks are so scared.”

David Axelrod, Obama’s political architect, said it was “very clear early in the transition” that Obama would have to attack a number of festering issues simultaneously.

“The times demanded it,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t have the luxury of taking things sequentially, year after year, and hoping we got there. That’s the reason that all these major issues had been deferred for decades: Change is hard.”

Axelrod said the president is “looking forward to an active fall” when he returns from next week’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and is not as worried about the outlook as the denizens of Washington, where “every day is election day.”

But the “Big Bang” theory of governance, as some White House insiders called it, is not without risk and consequences.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama gave Republicans the chance to define large swaths of the debate. Conservatives successfully portrayed the stimulus bill as being full of pork for Democrats. Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.” The GOP also has successfully raised concerns that the Obama plan is a big-government takeover of health care — and much of Middle America bought the idea, according to polls.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies. He spent little time explaining the biggest bailouts in U.S. history, which he inherited but supported and expanded. And then he lost crucial support on the left by not following up quickly with new and stricter rules for Wall Street. On Friday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman echoed a concern widely shared among leading liberals. “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”

By doing so much so fast, Obama jammed the circuits on Capitol Hill. Congress has a hard time doing even one big thing well at a time. Congress is good at passing giveaways and tax cuts, but has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996. “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.

By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters — especially independents — worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents’ confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.

Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts — but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.

Go-big-or-go-home isn’t the only theory of the case that a new president can adopt. The most promising alternative is to build public support over time by showing competence and success, then using that to leverage bigger things.

So imagine if Obama had focused on fixing the economy, and chosen presidential power over congressional accommodation and constructed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a true, immediate stimulus without the pork and paybacks.

He then could have pushed through tougher regulation of financial institutions, making it clear people were paying for their sins, and would have a much harder time doing it again. This would have delighted the left and perhaps bought Obama more durable support among independents. Instead, the left thinks he’s beholden to investment banks, and much of the public sees no consequences for the financial mess.

Add in some serious budget cuts, and Obama would have positioned himself as a new kind of liberal with the courage to tame Washington and Wall Street, as promised. Under this scenario, Obama might be getting more credit for the economic recovery that appears to be under way. This would have positioned him to win health care reform starting next year — a mighty achievement, and clear vindication against the doubters. Some White House officials said they are skeptical of moving controversial bills in an election year, when lawmakers are often more timid.
White House officials say they never seriously considered a more incremental approach to the year, though they did privately discuss trying to get regulation of the financial sector done right after the stimulus bill. There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.

If the current strategy fails, the same person who got much of the credit for the crisp first 100 days will get some of the blame: White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. It was Emanuel who has strongly advocated the big-bang approach, declaring during the transition: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Now, what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do.”

The confidence of Obama’s aides was bolstered by their fresh memory that a similar approach had worked very effectively for then-President George W Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the public on edge, Bush was able to enact restrictive policies under the banner of protecting American soil, and build an entire new department of government that voters otherwise might have opposed. The economic meltdown would be Obama’s Sept. 11 — the predicate for sweeping legislation that he wanted to enact anyway.

Just past halftime in his first year, the president has won passage of a long list of bills that the White House points to as proof of their approach. In addition to the stimulus, Obama signed major bills on tobacco, pay equity, children’s health insurance, national service and the mortgage rescue. If he gets health care and either energy or regulation this year, it would be hard to argue the big-bang plan wasn’t a success.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), now president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cautions that any verdict on Obama would be “kind of like judging a major surgical operation in the middle of the operation.”

With Obama reaching the defining season of his freshman year, Hamilton said the current agenda reminds him of the scale of the Great Society programs Congress was tackling when he came to Congress in 1965. “This president thinks big but I also think he acts pragmatically,” Hamilton said. “So many things in a congressional session come together at the last few hours, the last few weeks.”

But sometimes they just come undone.

Zachary Abrahamson contributed to this report.

A number of points of order: Politico says that “Congress…has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996.”But Bill Clinton did not transform anything; it was the Republicans under the Contract with America who imposed the welfare reform of 1996 – and Bill Clinton was forced to sign the thing he subsequently took credit for.

Politico cannot stop itself from falling into blaming Republicans for their health care demonizing. But there is an admission that even before health care came up on Obama’s timetable, it was DEMOCRATS who were worried and frightened at the agenda: “There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.” It would be nice if the mainstream media finally reported honestly and acknowledged that if health care doesn’t pass, it is because Democrats are worrying about their seats as an outraged electorate gets its revenge.

Another problem the Politico article glosses over is summed up in the statement:“By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies.” But the issue isn’t that Obama never educated the public on the logic behind his policies; it’s that his policies don’t have any logic beyond the most superficial big-government liberalism that most Americans reject. Other than the argument, “This is a naked power-grab intended to secure Democrat control for perpetuity,” there simply IS no argument.

There’s another point that the Politico article glosses over that emerges from the statement: “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.”That reason is the Constitution. We were never set up to be a fascist dictatorship or a totalitarian state disconnected from the deliberation of the people. Our founders made us to be a nation of laws, and follow a tried-and-true process that would slow us down to avoid tyranny.

We have the right to assemble, but the government is not obliged to transport us to protest sites. We have the right to speak, but the government is not required to provide us with a megaphone or a platform. The “negative liberties” allow us our basic freedoms while preserving our individual liberties and responsibilities. Obama wants to fundamentally do away with the Constitution in order to impose an entirely different system which creates a mega-state that will have innumerable duties to take care of us.

If he succeeds, the America that the founding fathers created will officially cease to exist. The nanny state isn’t in the Constitution, no matter how many penumbras and emanations liberal justices might claim to see in their crystal-ball-gazing.

As for the “death panels” being a bogus claim, do you want to know where the death panels are? They are right here:

The whole damn maze of bureaucracy is a “death panel.” Anyone who thinks that the government will be able to expand their government health care – which is already about to go bankrupt – to tens of millions more people, and save money doing it, is a fool. They are people who cannot see the facts through their ideology.

The Cloward-Piven strategy appears to be having a problem due to Barack Obama’s arrogance and unwillingness to continue to use the system to “get there” gradually.

The Democrats have an endgame: when the system collapses, the panicked people will turn to the very government that created the calamity and demand that it take care of them. And that is precisely what big government liberals have always preached.

One thing is clear: if Obama wins his “public option” in any form, it will become the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

If Obama’s “Big Bang” doesn’t go bust, America will be the one that goes bust and ends up exploding in a big bang of debt.